1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods which enable individuals to manipulate and accurately obtain information about the contents of a body of text without having to read the entire body of text.
2. Prior Art Statement
When a large amount of text is retrieved by a computer, typically only a small portion of that text is displayed on the computer screen at one time. The reason for this is that if the entire text were shown at once, the font size would be too small and the text would not be readable. As a result, a person who has retrieved a large body of text must either scroll through each line of the text or page down through the text from its beginning to its end.
When a computer user retrieves text, he/she often would like to know how long that body of text is prior to that person reading the text. One common prior art approach to this problem is to provide the computer user with a positional slider-bar adjacent to the retrieved text. Referring to FIG. 1, a typical prior art computer screen 10 is shown containing a positional slider-bar 12. When a portion of a body of text 14 is retrieved onto the computer screen 10, a positional slider-bar 12 is displayed at either the right or left boarder of the computer screen 10. The positional slider-bar 12 has a length L that represents the overall length of the retrieved body of text 14. The top end 18 of the positional slider-bar corresponds to the beginning of the retrieved body of text 14 and the bottom end 20 of the positional slider-bar 12 corresponds to the end of the retrieved body of text 14. A position indicator 22 is disposed at some point on the positional slider-bar 12 in between the top end 18 and the bottom end 20. The position indicator 22 shows the computer user what part of the body of text 14 is currently being displayed on the computer screen 10. In the shown example, the position indicator 22 is located at a point at the center of the positional slider-bar 12. As such, the computer user knows that he/she is currently viewing a segment of text located in the middle of the retrieved document.
In such prior art text viewing systems, a person can move a screen icon 23 to the position indicator 22 on the positional slider-bar 12 and can move position indicator 22 up and down on the positional slider-bar 12 with the screen icon 23. The text displayed on the computer screen 10 corresponds to the location of the position indicator 22 on the positional slider-bar 12. As a result, by moving the position indicator 22 to the top end 18 of the positional slider-bar 12, the text displayed on the screen 10 automatically scrolls to the beginning of the retrieved body of text 14. Similarly, if the position indicator 22 is moved to the bottom end 20 of the positional slider-bar 12, the text displayed on the screen 10 automatically scrolls to the end of the retrieved body of text 14.
Such prior art text viewing systems typically are not helpful in informing a user as to the length of a body of text 14. This is because the positional slider-bar 12, which is always the same size, regardless of the length of the text, does not include any information concerning scale. Furthermore, such prior art text viewing systems do not provide the user with any useful information regarding what is actually contained within the body of text 14. For instance, the prior art positional slider-bar 12 does not inform a user as to the number, relative length, and location of different paragraphs in the body of text 14 or the presence of charts, graphs, sideboxes, pictures or other related information in the body of text 14. As such, a user is unable to scan the contents or layout of the retrieved body of text 14 without first scrolling through the entire body of text 14.
A need therefore exists in the prior art for a text viewing system and method that would inform a computer user as to certain details of a retrieved body of text without having to scroll through the entire body of text. Such a system would improve a users understanding of the text, thereby leading to improved reading proficiency and comprehension.